Thursday, August 26, 2010

The No-Choice Lie

"I had no choice," "They forced us," and too many similar variations have become the big lies in public life. Scam artists, politicians, murderers, and church officials each and all try to cloak their iniquities with this deceit.

At its worst, we see this with abusers. Low life sorts who beat a spouse or child claim self-defense, hold that the victim forced them to do it. Oddly, when it comes to pols, institutional spokesfolk and the like, media types don't seem to call them to task or ridicule them for it. That has become the job of the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert shows.

The example in today's paper was with Joe the Tree Guy. MA Gov.-Would-Be Charlie Baker spotlights him as someone forced, forced I say, into bankruptcy by the onerous left-wing business regulations here. It turns out he seems to have run up huge credit-card bills on luxury purchases with money he didn't have. Forced, forced he says, by regulations not his profligacy.

In the same mold, but even more convoluted, has been the Roman Catholic claim that its adoption agencies were forced to stop all services in Britain as well as the U.S. Again, "forced" is a lie, more invidious here than in London.

In the UK, the government ruled flat out that all adoption agencies had to provide services to homosexual couples as well as straight ones. In the U.S., we allow virtually all churches to overtly discriminate in adoption, employment, membership and more. However, our government provides grants to agencies that follow federal non-discrimination guidelines.

In England and the U.S. various Catholic Charities organizations halted all adoptions in lieu of having to be equal. Over there, churchy types were direct about it — According to the Daily Mail, the Catholic Care charity, run by the Diocese of Leeds, said the right to discriminate against homosexual couples was “a principle of Catholic organization.”

From Boston to San Francisco, archbishops and cardinals waved the big lie again and again. The government forced them to stop arranging adoptions.

Of course, the reality is that even in the UK, these agencies had a choice. They could offer non-discriminatory adoptions. If they decided their need to discriminate and follow the clerical politicians' pronouncements was more important than the kids and parents, that was in fact a choice.

They had a lot more latitude in the U.S. Our governments did not require them to be fair to homosexuals. We just won't pay them to discriminate. They were welcome to go about their bigoted version of adoption, but they wouldn't get the same subsidy that non-discriminating agencies would.

Moreover, adoption is not creed or other aspects of religion. It's a side business for the church and as such regulated like all other non-church activities. On top of that, they actually had the funds on both coasts to continue their adoption agencies. The force here was not the secular government, rather from the higher ranking church pols, apparently including the big guy in the Vatican.

Another of my favorites is the parents rights types claiming their own coercion by pinko governments. The most duplicitous among them surely must be MA's own David Parker. As depicted by his most active shill, MassResistance, his young kids were forcefully indoctrinated into acceptance of homosexuality, he and his wife were forced to abandon their religious teaching of their kids, and he was forced to spend jail time because all he wanted to to speak his piece to school officials.

The reality shows the depravity of the they-forced-me liars. Consider:

All parents were informed at open meetings and in letters sent home that kids would get sealed bags of several books as part of a diversity curriculum.

The kids brought home the bag for parental review and the adults could choose which if any of the books they would read with their kids.

Parker's response was to insist that the school change its curriculum and teaching to suit him, that it inform him before even the concept of homosexual marriage in a state where it is legal be mentioned, by students or teachers that his kids be taken out of class.

He staged a sit in at the school after refusing any accommodation by the teachers, principal and superintendent.

He also refused for four or so hours to leave the building after the police told him to go home.

When finally arrested for trespass at night, he said he was forced into action.

When offered bail, he refused, claiming instead, he was forced to spend the night in jail.

Most they-forced-me liars are not as crazy as that or perhaps they simply don't have that much time.

Parker has become a special instance through his hyperbole and lies. He travels domestically and even to the Caribbean to lie for his cause. Anti-gay and anti-marriage-equality organizations frequently repeat his lies of indoctrination and imprisonment. His fictitious yarns of being denied the right to discuss gay marriage from his religion's point of view with his kids are spun again and again.

Honestly, all but the most demented of us believes in free will. Actually it is a cornerstone of this country.

How is it that these serial liars make a choice, they insist they had no choice?

If Catholic Charities in Boston takes the Pope's stand that there'll be no adoptions by gay couples, they know what they may lose in grant money. If they choose to stop all adoptions rather than carry on with good work without the grants, who is forcing them to do that?